The next installment of the Gunship Tech Talk focuses on Lasers, Hybrid Lasers and Rail Guns, part of a series on the weapons of Gunship and the Reilly Campbell Chronicles. Rotating Bofors laser turrets, twin rail guns with high speed accumulators, desensitizers, concussives, X93 laser battery, FX3700 sniper rifle, H.E.A.T. grenades, breacher charges, laser propelled molten tantalum rounds…..it’s nice to have options, especially when you’re up against alien hoards, bounty hunters, mercenaries and psychopaths!
In the next several Tech Talks, we’ll take a look at some of the latest and greatest in new technologies for current and future battlefield weaponry. Since shooting is a favorite hobby of mine, especially high power rifle, expect to see a couple installments dedicated to this area. It’s not a coincidence that Joby Ty and Tiny excel at long range shooting and it will make for a more than a few dramatic battle scenes in the series. But that’s for another time. Today's talk focuses on lasers, hybrid lasers and rail guns.
The rotating Bofors laser turret is one of the weapons the ISU seems to love to mount on anything that moves. For Reilly and crew it’s the gun on their initial ship and also the modified turret on their Tactical Offroad Retrieval Rover (TORR). Lasers are a great option for a number of reasons: they can engage multiple targets, they have “large” magazines relying on chemicals or gas to power them and coolant to keep the thermal aspects under control, they can kill at the speed of light, they are very accurate and easy to adjust (as long as your frequency modulator doesn’t get burned out by a restraint field during a landing on a remote moon….), the cost per shot is cheap and they can be designed to fit a variety of platforms. But you also can have some challenges with a laser only weapon which is why the Bofors laser turret is a hybrid that employs both laser and molten tantalum rounds against targets to ensure that they are dead and that they stay dead. For example, a laser, even a strong one may not have the desired effect against a hardened structure or a target that is armored. This type of target would require a kinetic component to ensure the desired level of damage. Certain types of atmospheres and wavelength filters could also potentially limit the effectiveness of a laser weapon. The operator would also have to have line of site to the target which usually means if you can see the target they can probably see you too!
Straight up laser only weapons are used during the series but I tried to reflect some of the reality of what we know to be true today about lasers by using them in roles that make sense. Lasers are used in active defensive roles such as the X93 Battery, a counter artillery and counter landing craft weapon employed by alien forces called the Vhax. In this role the laser weapons provide forces with a way to defend large areas against invading spacecraft, artillery, missiles and rockets granting a greater freedom of movement to troops operating in the area. I also focused on the much cooler role of lasers as offensive weapons providing both friend and foe with the ability to attack a range of targets and cause kinetic and non-kinetic effects like when Reilly steals a starfighter to escape from….oops! Don’t want to ruin the story….you’ll have to read the book on that one. But seriously, just contemplate the types of air and space battles that can take place when you have multiple platforms with precision lasers. The speed and number of engagements would really keep the action moving as man and machine fought for the upper hand against both airborne and ground based threats. These weapons could be focused to provide true surgical strike capabilities on the battlefield for close air support to friendly forces below. And think about the sniper/counter-sniper applications – the shot that you would never see or hear coming at the speed of light. More to follow in the awesome battle scenes coming up in book II!
Today, lasers already serve a variety of purposes on the battlefield and projectile based auto-turrets like the Counter-Rocket and Mortar (C-RAM) Land-based Phalanx Weapon System (LPWS) which even as a prototype has done pretty well in providing attack warning and in taking out incoming mortar rounds and rockets in Iraq and Afghanistan. The C-Ram consists of a 20mm M61A1 Gatling gun capable of firing up to 4,500 high-explosive self-destruct rounds per minute at incoming enemy rounds. Imagine R2D2 crossed with the Terminator and slinging a large rotating machine gun around on full auto and you'll have the C-Ram.
The idea for the hybrid weapons utilizing tantalum rounds came from research into the limitations of lasers and the need for a backup if somehow environmental or target factors mitigated the laser. It would only make sense that since a laser is giving off heat that you would be efficient and take advantage of that energy. A hybrid weapon could utilize the laser to heat propellant to an extremely high temperature which would improve the efficiency of the round being shot. This can be seen today in the designs for thermal rockets where the laser heated propellant provides the propulsion for the rocket (this is also being examined as a possible solution for propulsion of certain kinds of space craft). DARPA, Sandia Labs, and many other organizations have been looking into laser hybrid weapons and Boeing has successfully tested their laser hybrid system, the Avenger, a directed energy/25 mm machine gun combo, making today’s science fiction a not so distant soon to be fact. BAE’s Tactical Laser System (TLS) is already being advertised for use onboard naval vessels as a counter for "swarm boats and UAVs" as part of the Mk 38 Machine Gun System (MGS). The laser effects on the target are controlled by gun operators by adjusting the focus, dwell time and aim point on the target. TLS has been tested against mock “pirate” ships and has been touted as being able to knock out engines and take down threats even in a busy marine environment where friendlies and civilians may be present. Not that Crazy Ray really cares who gets taken out in the chaos...
Of course every weapon design prompts other designers to develop a counter. In this case, the counter to the laser and the hybrid would be the rail gun. One of the most devastating weapons and a key piece of hardware on all Dark Angel Gunship armament packages, rail guns can send rounds downrange at hypersonic speed, potentially fast enough to beat the laser system's ability to hit the incoming slugs or to prevent the rounds from creating explosive damage on their intended target. Present day, the rail gun is already making waves. The U.S. Navy is testing out this new capability, sending a projectile speeding at over 5500 mph to targets sitting over 100 miles away by zapping a million amps through two rails and a conductor to generate an electromagnetic field that then launches the round downrange. Pretty impressive. While the rail gun is king for today, keep an eye out for new developments in the area of directed energy weapons. There is always a counter to the counter and just when you think you know what’s coming next…
Thanks for taking the time to geek out with me! More Gunship Tech Talks are in the works. Want more now? Visit iTunes, Nook, or Amazon’s Kindle today and get your copy of Gunship and join in the fight!
